Sunday, December 19, 2010

X-Plane for Android

As some have noticed on the org and on FaceBook, Randy mentioned that we may be able to ship X-Plane Mobile for Android. Some users were quite befuddled to learn that we were aiming to ship X-Plane Mobile for Android so soon when X-Plane 10 is delayed. Here's the full story.

Chris, the third and most recent addition to the X-Plane programming team, began a port of X-Plane Mobile to Android a while ago; this was the second port of X-Plane Mobile after our port to Palm WebOS. He was able to accomplish most of the port fairly quickly; hence the video floating around the web of X-Plane on a Nexus One back in May.

Unfortunately we ran into some issues that stopped ship; it looks like Google may have them fixed shortly, hence our hope of finally shipping the app. So while Chris has spent a little bit of time recently working on the last few Android issues, our hope is to release a product that we already put development time into a while ago.

Not sure. We're definitely not done bringing things to Android, but I'm not sure what the next steps will be, exactly...partly we need to wait and see a bit how the platform does and what kinds of issues the platform has.

Although I am impressed with X-Plane running on my Nexus, I am very disappointed when I compare it to X-Plane HD on my son's iPhone Touch. For the same price I get a couple of planes an places and he gets over 40 planes and 20 places. What are the development plans for Android?